Happy 2016! We are excited to start the year off with a new software update. This release continues to expand our content automation offering with a focus on usability, performance, and quality.

The February release includes new features and enhancements building on our last release in October 2015. Many of these features and enhancements are an example of our continued responsiveness to customers as we add value to the overall content automation solution.

Below is a summary of the new features and enhancements; we hope you enjoy the many benefits it delivers.

Quark Publishing Platform

Quality improvements

Excel charts – improved automated rendering for Excel charts with a focus on supporting a broader range of scenarios reported by our customers, including callouts in pie charts and data intensive x and y axis labels

Component-based Publishing – the publishing framework now provides parameters for previewing a single section or table rather than previewing the whole document

Chart rendering – to increase the flexibility of rendering charts via our charting service, you can now specify a chart image format during the publishing process

Infrastructure upgrades

Aspose (default PDF handling in MS Office) to 8.7.0.2

HighCharts (static and dynamic charting service) to 4.2.1

PhantomJS (JavaScript library required for HighCharts) to 2.0

QuarkXPress Server

Highlighted improvements

Footnote references – added support for layouts which include a footnote reference inside a table cell

Region and list publishing – publishing support for the expanded feature set in Quark Author now includes Box and Callout examples showing two possible layouts in PDF and HTML, and you can easily create your own

Automation improvements – in addition to quality and performance optimization, box structures now include new features for automated horizontal and vertical padding and tables break better across pages

Quark Author Web Edition

New Features

Regions – we now provide grouping of sequential content selections into meaningful customer-defined regions to support a range of use cases, including sidebar callouts and subtitled boxes

Expanded list structures – for more detailed procedures or illustrated steps, you can now add additional paragraphs, figures, tables, and regions to individual list items

Increased metadata coverage – the new regions and lists both include our full range of metadata functionality, so you may now apply relevant information to additional areas within your business-critical content

Usability enhancements

Improved table editing – you can now add header rows when creating tables or while editing existing tables

Extended table references – you can now add captions and descriptions to referenced tables

Image insertion – you can now insert images from your local file system and easily change images to a formal figure structure

Metadata updates in previews – you can now see refreshed metadata values in the preview pane, even when your content is a work-in-progress

Quark XML Author

Usability enhancements

Improved table editing performance – working with structured tables is easier with improved performance for inserting or removing rows and columns, aligning text, making selections, adjusting columns, cut/copy/paste and other table operations

Faster keystroke response – end users will notice a marked performance improvement in the rendering of typed characters in the authoring canvas, with performance approaching the native MS Word experience but with the added benefit of componentized content

Increased speed when opening or saving documents – documents made from multiple server-based components now open and save in seconds, a 1500% improvement in some cases

Infrastructure upgrades

.NET upgrade – the dependency for .NET 3.5.1 has been removed, enabling the latest features and fixes; this requires any 3.5 level custom EIs to be recompiled with .NET Framework 4.5.1

Microsoft Office and Quark XML Author Adapters

Highlighted improvements

Component usability – referenced components now include additional metadata information and may be edited directly from the XML Author canvas

Improved component naming – local components can now be named before saving them to the server; with increased options for validating names and ensuring they are unique

Administrative enhancements

New installer – the Windows MSI Installer for Microsoft Office Adapters supports multiple user profiles on a single system and is now shipped in addition to Quark’s existing installer (which is based on standard Microsoft ClickOnce technology)

Cancel all checkouts – a new API call supports canceling all active checkouts within a single document in one step

Bulk data loading performance – improved performance when checking in large numbers of assets by an order of magnitude

Platform XTensions for QuarkXPress and QuarkCopyDesk

Highlighted improvements

Compliance with new QuarkXPress features

Certification for El Capitan

Word counts – the number of words in an article component are now calculated and displayed

How do I learn more?
For a complete breakdown of what’s new in this release, how to upgrade or for any other questions, please contact your support representative by visiting quark.parature.com. Please note that enterprise upgrades are only available to customers with current maintenance agreements.